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FOUNDED BY JOHN O. ROCKErELLER 



A CRITICAL STUDY OF CURRENT 

THEORIES OF MORAL 

EDUCATION 



A DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS 

AND LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE 

OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

(DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION) 



BY 



JOSEPH KINMONT HART 



CHICAGO 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 

1910 



■m 



Ube Tllntverstti? of Cbicaoo 

FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 



A CRITICAL STUDY OF CURRENT 

THEORIES OF MORAL 

EDUCATION 



A DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS 
AND LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE 

of doctor of philosophy 
(department of education) 



BY 

JOSEPH KINMONT HART 



CHICAGO 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 

1910 



c*^ 



fo 



<h 



vv^ 



Copyright iqio By 
The University of Chicago 

Published April igio 



Composed and Printed By 

Tlie University of Chicago Press 

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A 



!GU2'61267 



PREFACE 

This study was evolved in connection with the writer's work in the 
departments of philosophy, psychology, and sociology. It is not a report 
of work done in a laboratory, though laboratories are not unknown to the 
writer. It is herein implied, if not explicitly stated, that the greatest 
problem in the educational situation, today, is one which cannot adequately 
be handled in the mere laboratory. In fact, it cannot be found inside a 
laboratory. It is the larger problem of the intimate logic of experience, 
in which concrete educational values are created and assimilated, and the 
wider problem of the uncertain play of those social forces which alone can 
give adequate stimulation to the individual's educational activities. Out 
of these vital situations there may arise, here and there, important prob- 
lems of detail which can be handled successfully only in a laboratory. 
But laboratory and "life" must alike contribute to the development of a 
convincing "logic of experience" which will serve as a more adequate 
guide in pedagogical practice. 

The following writings and materials have helped to mold the point 
of view underlying this study: in psychology, Angell's Psychology; articles 
by Dewey, especially on "The Reflex Arc Concept," and "The Theory 
of Emotions"; Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order; and par- 
ticularly some unpublished lectures by Professor G. H. Mead, on "Social 
Psychology," and "The Logic of the Social Sciences"; in logic, Dewey's 
Studies in Logical Theory, supplemented by studies in the development of 
logical theory, with Professor A. W. Moore; Ethics by Dewey and Tufts, 
with work in the historical evolution of morality and ethics with Professor 
Tufts, gives the fundamental point of view; and the general educational 
standpoint is found in unpublished lectures by Professors Dewey, Mead, 
Angell, Tufts, and Henderson. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Introduction i 

II. The Nature or the Concrete Educational Problem 5 

III. The Nature of the Moral in Education: Some Tenta- 
tive Answers 11 

IV. The Nature of the Moral in Education: An Organic 
Statement 21 

A. The Psychological Point of View for Moral Education 

B. The Ethical Point of View: The Content of Moral Edu- 
cation 

C. The Logic of Moral Education 

V. The Logic of School 39 



I. INTRODUCTION 

Present-day awareness of the insuflficiency of our educational results, 
and present-day protests against traditional educational theory and prac- 
tice have become very specific in form, and are becoming very general in 
extent. 

We are being told by Dr. Edward Everett Hale that our public -school system 
almost fails in instilling morality, by President Eliot that the intelligence pro- 
duced is ineffective and not worth the money spent, by Admiral Evans that its 
product is contemptible, by Fiske that it is useless in business, by Edison that it 
has no profitable relation to applied science, by A. C. Benson and Sir Frederic 
Harrison that it is eminently successful in turning out uniformly stupid types, void 
of originality, by Rabbi Hirsch that it is the biggest failure of modem times.' 

It is true that much of this sort of criticism is largely rhetorical; but 
the mass of it, which fills unnumbered pages of periodical literature, and 
books without end, is not only true as applied to the public-school system, 
but, to a greater or less degree, of all forms of educational activity. The 
critical and reconstructive forces of the modern world, which have been 
producing such profound and beneficent changes in many phases of our 
world-experience, are but slowly penetrating into the region of educational 
theory and practice. This is, of course, quite in keeping with the general 
logic of experience : that which is most intimate in experience yields itself 
last of all and most unwillingly to the criticisms and reconstructions which 
the changing order brings. 

In spite of this fact, much has ahready been accomplished in the direc- 
tion of educational reconstruction. Society as a whole, however, lacks 
the reconstructive purpose. Reconstruction, too often, connotes mere 
iconoclastic innovation, lacking seriousness of programme. There is popu- 
lar distrust of the efficacy of present reconstructive methods. There is a 
decided unwillingness to permit educational institutions and activities 
to be thrown into the general current of scientific experimentation. Even 
educational theory maintains a certain sacredness of character. All this 
is due, partly to the sacred regard in which "education" is held, especially 
by the American mind; partly to the naive distrust of experimental methods. ^ 
But the values of these new ideals can be determined only by passing 

I Johnston, "Social Significance of Various Movements for Industrial Education," 
Educational Review, Vol. XXXVII, pp. 160-80. ' 



2 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

them through the fierce heats of battles with old ideals in a very real 
"struggle for existence." In this way, the "new education" is slowly 
working its way into social consciousness, and becoming a part of social 
method. And as society becomes more and more self -directive, self-con- 
trolled, and self-conscious, the spirit of reconstruction will find itself more 
and more at home in the region of pedagogical activity, and more pro- 
found and far-reaching results will follow, both for the child and for the 
social whole. For, in this way of education, alone, will come that more 
intelligent control of the whole process of social growth and reproduction 
which is, at present, the hope of social theorists.^ 

If we should attempt to sum up all the criticisms of present-day results 
in education, one word would, perhaps, suffice to cover all points of attack. 
Almost all criticisms agree that our actual educational results are, in vary- 
ing degrees, irrelevant to the actual life-conditions of the modern world. They 
do not effectually function in relating the growing individual to the actual 
world in which he is to live. Accordingly, all efforts under the direction 
of the "new education" are employed in the task of securing results that 
will be relevant to the world in which the developing individual is to live. 
Some of these efforts are, in themselves, more or less krelevant to the 
situation, because they are mechanical and arbitrary in every way, while 
the present trend of affairs is in the direction of a more vital emphasis 
upon personality; some of them but repeat, under other forms, traditional 
errors; but the most vital and promising of these efforts have set themselves 
some more or less complete phase of the definite task of scientifically con- 
sidering the whole field of education in its relation to the whole of life, 
with the hope of working out some more completely organic conception of 
the process. We shall note some of these attempts later; here it is neces- 
sary to make clear the central problem of the educational situation of today. 

There is a "new" biology which attempts to state the appearance of 
specific forms of organisms in terms of the life-conditions which obtain 
in the production of those forms. This procedure is becoming the general- 
ized method of wide ranges of scientific inquiry. Thus, psychology is 
attempting to describe the conditions under which the phenomena of 
mental life appear; logic is interested in the conditions under which we 
realize our worlds of physical and social relationships; and ethics is giving 
us the historical and psychological conditions under which the progressive 
realization of our moral values goes on in concrete experience. Now, 
in so far as education is anything more than the mere absorption of concrete 
social habits, or the mere impartation of concrete information, such sciences 
I Sumner, Folkways, p. ii8. 



INTRODUCTION 3 

as psychology, logic, and ethics have been peculiarly efficient in rescuing 
it from its primitive naivete. But the persistent problem in educational 
theory, today, is this : Can education be reconstructed on the basis of the 
functional aspects of these foundation sciences ? Can the creative aspect 
of experience, as contrasted with the merely cumulative aspect, be made the 
central factor in the organization of educational activities ? Can the pro- 
cess of mental development be substituted for the traditional method 
of mere impartation of ideas? 

There is still a profound difference of opinion at this point. Over 
against any suggestion of change in the fundamentals of educational prac- 
tice, the old tradition rises in protest. It is a theoretically impregnable 
position that (to quote a modern German writer), "Weltanschauung und 
Unterricht miissen miteinander harmonieren " ; but in practice there 
seems to be a fundamental conflict between the very concept of "Unter- 
richt," and the modern "Weltanschauung." The same writer declares, 
further: " Wir diirfen auch die alten Bausteine nicht mehr benutzen, wenn 
wir sehen sie morsch geworden sind." But conservative educational prac- 
tice replies: "Is it certain that the old foundations are rotten? And, if 
they are, can these modern 'structureless' sciences give us actual and 
substantial foundations in their stead? Do they not, rather, destroy all 
possibility of secure foundation?" 

However, since education is a vital phase of the whole of the social 
process, and not a mere addendum to it, any change in the general social 
point of view must be reflected, in some measure, in educational theory 
and practice; and if that changed social point of view should profoundly 
affect the very heart of the social process and the conception of social 
method, educational activities must be profoundly affected, likewise: the 
present unrest is witness of this principle. Compayre has pointed out 
that "to the changing conceptions in psychology changing conceptions in 
pedagogy constantly correspond," and that "every ethical system contains 
within itself the germs of an original and appropriate system of pedagogy."^ 
In another place he speaks of the effects upon pedagogical practice of 
changing points of view in logical theory. 

The issue is, thus, fairly joined between these foundation sciences 
of psychology, logic, and ethics, and that superstructure of educational 
theory and practice which is built upon them. These sciences have been 
profoundly changed in recent years, so much so, indeed, that the older 
conceptions are no longer dynamically present in our constructive thinking 
or in our thoughtful activities: how, then, shall education, which rests 
I Compayre, Histoire de la pedagogic, p. xi. 



4 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

upon them, escape the profound reconstruction which is implicit in this 
changed foundation ? 

But the issue is deeper than a mere struggle between points of view 
in contemporary scientific doctrine. The changed points of view in psychol- 
ogy, logic, and ethics do not make manifest in scientific forms the changed 
points of view in concrete social processes. It is a social change of method; 
it has gone far on its theoretical side : the present and the immediate future 
are waiting to see whether society will be able to carry out in any complete 
and practical way the educational reconstructions which are demanded 
by these theoretical considerations, and which are most urgently rooted 
in the very logic of present-day social conditions. 

This study will be devoted to a consideration of certain phases of this 
reconstructive task. The thesis here set forth is this: What is demanded 
by the most urgent considerations of social unrest, today, and what is 
implied in the reconstructions of educational foundations, must be carried 
through in spite of the opposition of traditional institutions. 



II. THE NATURE OF THE CONCRETE EDUCATIONAL 

PROBLEM 

In the primitive group-life, consciousness and responsibility were limited 
to the concreteness of the world of active relationships. Education was, 
therefore, completely social in character and results, because the whole 
of society was found in the concrete world of the developing individual. 
There were no social situations which lay beyond the possible experience 
of the individual, no scientific differentiations of experience remote from 
the practice of life. The educational processes were implicit in the com- 
munity life-processes. The content of knowledge was in the social habits 
and activities, the results were such as had immediate application in prac- 
tice, which were called for in the concrete social situations, and which were 
subject only to the general law of the elimination of the unfit. Throughout 
the period of plasticity and development the youth felt himself surrounded 
by the upholding, compelling, criticizing, and constructive forces of the 
social life. The educative processes were a part of the whole struggle 
for existence which the whole group was constantly facing, and they, 
therefore, carried with them the vital sanctions of life itself. 

The results of such immediate processes of education could be stated, 
of course, in terms of complete social adaptation: the life of the group 
became the content of the life of the growing youth, and at his initiation 
into manhood he took upon himself, emotionally, all the content of the 
social purpose. In so far, then, as the social and the moral are identical, 
such education was completely moral; i. e., it organically included all the 
elements of consciousness and responsibility that the adult life afforded. 
Its lack must be stated in terms of the limited content of the life of the lim- 
ited group — a lack that could be met only by means of social reconstructions 
that should be based on the inclusion of wider ranges of interest and activity 
within the group, the " cross-fertilizations of cultures," the development of 
a wider basis for a more complete consciousness and a richer personality. 
In the primitive world — a world whose control was largely extrinsic — 
this development could come only by means of the social shock of group 
conflict, conquest, and assimilation. In this way, alone, could group 
habit be broken and the possibility of larger and richer phases of conscious- 
ness be assured. Habit and the absorption of habit were fully provided 
for: the educational lack lay in the direction of that outlook which comes 

S 



6 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

only in the reconstructive attitude, which is productive of the more inclusive 
social self-consciousness and which is deposited in the social inheritance 
in terms of theory. 

But modern educational practices must function in a very different 
sort of world, and the changed world has come to realize that educational 
practices have not kept up their primitive organic and vital relatedness 
to the life -processes and social situations. The social and scientific phases 
of experience have grown very complex and become differentiated into 
the worlds of social and scientific theories under the forms of "sciences" 
which are more or less divorced from the immediacy of practice, and which 
lie, for the most part, beyond the experience of all save experts in each par- 
ticular science. To be sure, there is a large body of common social habit, 
knowledge, tradition, popularized science, etc., which becomes, in some 
degree, the common possession of all members of a common society, and 
which corresponds to the practices of the primitive group, being perpetuated 
and propagated by the same sorts of primitive educational agencies. But 
it is within the limits of this popular knowledge that quackery and hum- 
bugs have their most persistent operations; it is the seed-bed of social 
prejudices and ignorance. Its traditions keep it from accepting progress; 
and save as its superstitions, mere opinions, and attenuated facts are broken 
through by some sort of process which sets the problem of reconstruction 
and conscious enlargement, there is no opportunity for either individual 
moral character, large reverence for truth, or the taste for the finer forms 
of beauty to thrive. 

It is in the relation of individual and social activities to the more critical 
and constructive arts and sciences, which rise like mountain peaks beyond 
the borders of this common ground, that the educational, i. e., the moral 
and social, values are to be achieved today. Each of these sciences has 
its definite and vital relationship to the social life and possibilities of our 
times: each offers opportunity for the development of individual powers 
of appreciation and living; each offers possibilities of enlarging the sum of 
human controls of the resources of the world. Whether on the side of the 
physical or the social sciences, the opportunity is the same. Indeed, it 
may well be pointed out that the development of the physical world and 
its sciences has been a means to social differentiation and attainment, 
and that the enlargement of the social world has been made possible only in 
terms of the extension of man's control over, and reconstruction of, the 
world of physical means. For example, the only way the Roman could 
concretely think the Roman Empire was by means of the connecting Roman 
roads that ran to every corner of it; and conversely, the only excuse for 



NATURE OF THE CONCRETE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM 7 

building those roads lay in the extension of the social consciousness which 
demanded a concrete and continuous means of expressing itself. 

But, today, theory has far outrun the possibility of concrete presentation 
to the common man: there are no "Roman roads" through the world- 
empires of most of the sciences by means of which they can be made con- 
crete to the ordinary citizen. To be sure, the tremendous offerings of 
knowledge give endless opportunities for the satisfaction of all sorts of 
interests or curiosities, for the enlargement of funds of information, or 
for the enrichment of personality. And one can imagine a world of serious 
personalities, each with its own practical foundation in concrete interest, 
finding in the wealth of the world's intelligence opportunity to develop 
endlessly in chosen directions; using theory to make practice efficient and 
intelligent, and giving concreteness to the theoretical by putting it at work 
in the world of activities. 

But, today, practice and theory seem, most frequently, to miss each 
other. Practice is impatient of theory and goes on its own way despising 
the "impractical," and ends, usually, in a blind alley of habit from which 
it has no power to escape. Or, theory feels itself mdependent of practice, 
is sure that if it "knows" it can readily "do" and goes on its own way. 
But in attempting to climb the mountains of pure theory, it too often 
misses altogether the meanings and relations science really bears to social 
living, and it becomes lost on the cold heights of mere theoretical consider- 
ation. Thus, the student of political science may forget, or despise, to 
vote; and the student of theology may miss or come to despise the love 
which "sufEereth long and is kind." 

Concretely, this sets the educational problem of the present. Tradition- 
ally, practice was secured in the social life and practical activities of the 
home, the farm, and the more simple social situation of the past; while the 
school came in to offer a complement in the way of theory. This theory 
was usually very remote from the actual life of the child; but so long as 
there was real practice in the mastery of life, the irrelevancy of the theoretical 
learning of the schools was not so noticeable. But when the city street 
took the place of the farm or the shop; when the flat took the place of the 
home with its round of social activities and interests, and when the isolation 
of the city's family-life took the place of the old neighborhood, with its 
oversight over growing youth, the old forms of practice almost completely 
disappeared; the school did not rise to this changed situation: the child 
was left, largely, to casual and meretricious influences at home and on the 
street, and to obviously irrelevant studies in the school. So the great 
educational problem becomes: How shall the educational forces that con- 



8 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

dition the development of the child be organized and controlled so as to 
assure the right amount of constructive practice for giving reality to the 
world and to experience, and the right amount of theory for giving ever- 
enlarging impetus to experience and intelligence in the control of the world, 
and the development of a constructive and responsibility-assuming attitude 
toward society ? 

Educational activity seems to be uncertain as to its proper direction 
in this emergency. Shall more practice be emphasized? The cry is 
immediately raised that such education tends to forget the old ideals of 
liberal culture, and to become merely utilitarian. Shall practice be ignored 
in the interests of the higher culture ? The answer is pointed out in the 
overcrowded professions, and the shallowness of our ideals of culture, etc. 
One inevitable result of the present situation is to be seen in the bewilder- 
ing number of different kinds of schools and "educations" which are 
demanding public attention and support. Many of these seize upon, and 
emphasize, some obvious aspect of the general situation, with impudent 
disregard of other aspects of the problem, or of the situation as a whole. 
Thus, we have schools of industry, trades, and commerce, covering every 
phase of the complex division of labor, and appealing to all who feel that 
the salvation of the world, at present, lies in the extension of practice, with 
but incidental regard for the elements of theory. On the other hand, 
there are the innumerable schools for professional, cultural, disciplinary, 
ethical, religious, and research interests, which largely ignore, and fre- 
quently despise, the practical phases of life.^ 

If, now, we ask what course, or courses, are open to present educational 
activity, and what prospects the immediate future offers of solution of these 
conditions, the reply seems to be indicated somewhat as follows: There 
are some who have especially strong intellectual tastes, who can "take on" 
ideas easily; these will want to fit themselves for the professions, the cultural 
arts, and the managing occupations; they are, therefore, to be educated 
along prevailingly intellectual and theoretical lines, with no special reference 
to practice during the period of educational preparation. There are a 
great many more who can hope to be nothing more than industrials all 
their days, who have little aptitude for ideas, and little interest in theory, 
and these must be content with a practice education for some industrial 
situation, with little reference to the higher intellectual or theoretical 
demands of the situation, or its implications for social life. While for 
both these classes these obviously imperfect forms of education are to 
be completed by means of some specifically "moral education" which 
I Johnston, Educational Review, Vol. XXXVII, pp. i6o f. 



NATURE OF THE CONCRETE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM 9 

shall relate the individuals and their classes, in some way, to a more unified 
and human world. This study will be specifically devoted to the consider- 
ation of those forms of "moral education" which are related to this theory, 
but it will be necessary to keep in mind, all the way, the organic relation- 
ships of the whole problem. 

We must not, however, lose sight of a very important fact: the most 
intelligent and constructive thought in education, today, is demanding that 
we shall stop talking about "professions" and "trades," with their conno- 
tations of class distinctions inimical to democracy; that we shall speak 
only of "vocations" for all; that, therefore, this overemphasis upon intel- 
lectualistic education for some, upon mere trade instruction for the many, 
and upon an exotic "moral education" for all, to serve as a humanizing 
of the mechanical, shall also come to an end; that in their place there shall 
be set up a more organic ideal of a properly liberal vocational education 
for all the differentiating aspects of life — an education in the very midst 
of life, which should carry with it its own moral inspirations and sanctions — 
and, finally, that this broadly liberal vocational education shall be for all, 
rich and poor alike, without exception. This ideal offers a suggestion of 
the line along which, ultimately, the divorce between theory and practice 
will be overcome; and in the working-out of this hope the unity of the 
primitive world of social education will find its way back into our modern 
life, carrying its highest moral controls and sanctions in its own activities, 
not implicitly, however, as in that primitive world, but consciously, now, 
and explicitly. 

But it must be added that, however desirable such a consummation 
may be, no one is able, at present, to offer working details of a method 
by which it may be realized. This is the largest constructive educational 
task that our educational thinking has formulated. In comparison with 
it the task of experimental determination of the mental conditions under 
which certain specific forms of "learning" may be most advantageously 
carried on is child's play. The full statement of the problem may be 
given in some such way as this: How shall we relate the various partial 
forms of educational activity of the present systems to the complete and 
concrete unity of the social process, so that these partial aspects of life 
shall be made to open out upon that world of complete human activity, 
in which, alone, whether for education or for occupation, the individual 
can actually find the social support, coercion, and constructive criticism 
which give vitality and meaning to individual endeavor? How shall the 
implicit values of primitive education be restored in explicit form in the 
complicated world of the present? 



lO CURRENT THEORIES OF MOEAL EDUCATION 

This question will always be relevant, even though the ideal mentioned 
above should be in large measure realized. For even a vocational educa- 
tion may lack some of the elements of social self-consciousness, social out- 
look, and acceptance of a share of social responsibility which are necessary 
elements in the genuinely ethical life today. It is not enough that the 
individual be honest, industrious, frugal, and law-abiding. It is essential 
that he share in the life of the world, which is his social community, as the 
primitive man shared the life of his world. So whether for the present 
situation, or for some future condition, the consideration of the moral 
phases of educational activities is a task that must be thoughtfully faced 
and constructively handled. 

To the critical consideration of some contemporary treatments of this 
subject we must now turn. 



III. THE NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION: SOME 
TENTATIVE ANSWERS 

The universal demand for an educational practice that shall secure 
larger moral results has already been noted. We need not dwell upon 
the ideal, but attention may be called to the fact that this demand is taking 
deeper and deeper roots in social consciousness, local, national, and inter- 
national; and that it is expressing itself in the form of criticisms of present 
practices and theories, in hints and schemes for the remaking of present 
practices, in national and international conventions for the spread of 
information and the deepening of the social consciousness of the world, 
in national and international inquiries for ascertaining the exact status 
of the moral-education situation in all parts of the world, and for the secur- 
ing of a new and definite foundation upon which to build wisely and widely. 
The problem is not a local one, for the world is no longer made up of local 
and isolated communities. In reality, the problem includes the world- 
wide situation: the individual lives in a community that has relationships 
with the ends of the earth, and that draws its support from all lands. We 
share the offerings of all the world: our food, our clothing, our ornaments, 
our household comforts, our implements, our amusements, our ideas, 
and our ideals — who shall say whence all these come to us ? To be sure, 
there is a fallacious popular political economy and social ethic that teaches 
that an exchange of services can be carried on on the impersonal level; 
that, e. g., eating the rice of Japan, if we have fully paid for it, we are in no 
sense morally related or bound to the producers of it. But the higher 
social consciousness is able to see the essential moral nature of all human 
relationships, whether between neighbors in the same flat, or neighbors 
on the other side of the world. Our moral relationships are as wide as 
our commercial relationships. The problem of moral education is to 
determine how these moral relationships which are unrecognized and 
implicit in all our world-life, both in the immediacy of the local community 
and in the largeness of the world, shall become explicit and effective in 
social consciousness. But, before we take up the intrinsic logic of this 
problem, we must turn to the consideration of some of the ways in which 
the facts are being conceived and treated in contemporary educational 
thinking and practice. 

Just as the common conceptions of general educational practices are 



12 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

thoroughly provincial in form, so it seems difficult for many to see the larger 
aspects of this problem of the moral elements in education, and their rela- 
tions to the whole social problem. For the most part, of course, this 
provincialism is due to a lack of psychological insight; moral education is 
confined to special provinces of life, or it is in terms of special materials; 
the impartation of particular ideas, called moral, or the working-up of 
special forms of feelings and sentiments, or the production of that abstract 
Kantianism "a good will," with no convincing insight into the processes by 
which these very desirable elements do really develop. We shall note, 
here, some of these ways of handling the problem. 

Much of the present-day insistence upon moralized education finds its 
psychological warrant, as well as its historical background and justification, 
in the psychology and pedagogy of Herbart, and the work of the Herbartians 
in Europe and America. In general, this constructive movement has stood 
for a direct method of moral instruction, claiming for this method the 
authority of Herbart's psychology, which asserts that all our mental facul- 
ties, including the will and conscience, are rooted in the "circle of thought," 
and, therefore, that education consists in introducing into this "circle of 
thought" ideas which shall act powerfully in the production of a good life. 
There is a very insidious charm in the simplicity and comprehensiveness of 
this theory. So great is this charm, and so insidious, that Professor John 
Adams has said: "Even if this theory is not true, teachers ought to wish 
that it were, and to act as if it were."^ The general pedagogical principle 
has been fully exploited in Europe and America. In America the effort 
has been sustained by the National Herbart Society, and for a time it 
seemed that "Herbartianism" would become the actual basis of all peda- 
gogy. Great good has come from the work done by this society, and the 
yearbooks of the society are filled with valuable materials. But to a large 
extent the most valuable materials are those which have been called forth 
in criticism of the general point of view.^ The criticism aroused has been 
exceedingly fruitful, and the certain end of the Herbartian propaganda 
is to be seen in the fact that the National Herbart Society has become, in 
recent years, the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education, 
giving up its propagandist tendencies and taking up, seriously, the actual 
scientific study of the problems which underlie the realization of a scientific 
pedagogical practice. 

But in England the vogue of direct moral instruction through the use 

1 In some unpublished lectures. 

2 Especially the work of Dewey; e. g., "Interest as Related to Will," in the Supple- 
ment to the Third Yearbook. 



NATURE OF THE MORAL EN EDUCATION I3 

of this Herbartian principle seems to be gaining strength. The Moral 
Instruction League of England issued, in 1908, a circular entitled Moral 
Instruction — What It Is and What It Is Not. Here moral instruction is 
defined as the "training of the children's feelings, judgment, and will, in 
order to insure that they play the part of good citizens in the family and 
country and as members of humanity." This is, of course, a very high 
ideal, a "consummation devoutly to be wished." But it is to be noted by 
way of criticism that this ideal assumes the existence of the child's feelings, 
judgment, and will, prior to the training, as faculties, and that it under- 
takes to train these pre-existent "faculties" to certain specific ends. In 
further explanation the statement of the league goes on to point out that 
"moral instruction proceeds by means of set lessons or conversations 
definitely directed to moral subjects." A list of these "moral subjects" 
is given, as follows: 

The subjects of moral instruction comprise temperance (i. e., general self- 
control), courage, patience, prudence, perseverance, kindness, generosity, mercy 
sincerity, truthfulness, modesty, conscientiousness, honor, industrious habits, 
justice, probity, right use of wealth, social service, duties of citizenship, respect for 
various forms of religious belief and practice, co-operation, international fraternity, 
art and nature, ethical elements in history, biography, and history. 

In a single paragraph the ideal of "moral education" as distinguished 
from "moral instruction," is set forth as follows: 

Moral education embraces a much wider field. It may or may not include 
systematic moral instruction in the essence just defined. It seeks to give a domi- 
nant ethical tendency to the whole process of the child's training in the home and 
school, by lessons that call out the social sentiments, by studies that exercise the 
moral judgment, by occupations that discipline the wiU to mutual consideration 
and service, and by impressing upon the imagination the duty of subordinating 
all intellectual and practical activity to the common welfare. 

This is all the league has to say on the broader aspects of the subject; 
and even in these few words the child seems lost under the burden of 
external institution and idea, and a sort of forced altruism that must be 
assimilated in rising to the level of "common welfare." The primary 
interest of the league is in moral instruction, and its more detailed explana- 
tion of the processes of this instruction throws light upon the league's con- 
ception of educational activity, in general. In answering the question, What 
is moral instruction ? the circular states: (i) "It is an interesting presenta- 
tation of the facts of the moral life." (These "facts" are said to be "judi- 
ciously selected instances of men, women, and children engaged in active 



14 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

well-doing." But there seems to be no conception on the part of the authors 
of the circular that such "facts" are not facts at all for a child, but, for 
the most part, and save as consciously controlled by the teacher, they are 
abstractions, pure and simple, out of a world of unrealities.) (2) "It 
trains the judgment by reasoning and questioning." (Again, it is pointed 
out that the reasons and questions are related to those selected instances, 
for the sake of unity. But this makes of judgment and reasoning highly 
intellectual and abstract functions, instead of vital and concrete processes 
of realization of meanings and adaptation.) (3) "It draws from an unre- 
stricted variety of sources." E. g., "A simple lesson in astronomy brings 
out the idea of law and order as revealed in the motions of the planets, 
of the regular and inevitable results of the earth's seasons, tides, etc.; 
and the children may then be led on to the conception of obedience to natural 
law; while this again prepares the way for obedience to social obligations. 
And so in other sciences." (4) "Its area is co-extensive with all ages and 
all nations." 

But we need not dwell longer on this commonplace and external method 
of dealing with the vastest issues of education. There is another aspect 
of direct moral instruction that has had its support in an appeal to some 
emotional constituent of experience for additional sanction. This additional 
sanction has usually been found in religion, though at times in other of 
the higher emotions and sentiments. There are some who affirm that 
moral education is impossible without some such appeal, and that mere 
moral instruction of the direct sort is useless, if not impossible. "Without 
religion the teacher has no basis for reproving a child for wrong-doing. 
He has nothing to put before him as an encouragement for doing good, 
or as an explanation of what he wishes the child to consider bad. There 
is nothing to give the child's mind the capacity for understanding the 
difference between right and wrong." At the International Moral Congress 
of 1908, Dr. Felix Adler insisted that moral education should be left entirely 
to voluntary associations because, he said, it is impossible to impress moral 
ideas without direct or implied reference to some fundamental religious 
or philosophical system, and the state must not bring such things into 
its schools. The utter formalism of this conception does not seem to be 
readily apparent. The unrelatedness of such teaching can be seen in the 
German schools, where a complete system of moral, or religious, education, 
based upon this sort of theory, is carried on; and in France, where a more 
definite system of moral education, based upon patriotism and "the sense 
of sociality," using as its text, not the Bible, but the "sacred book of the 
human soul," is in vogue. Both in Germany and in France the teaching 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 1 5 

is under state control; and in both countries the results are intellectual, 
and not vital and personal, save with the few who can understand. 

For direct moral instruction, whether based upon its own intrinsic 
meanings, or upon some emotional appeal, does not seem to get into the 
heart of the problem. Hence, there is a growing feeling that some indirect 
form of instruction must be devised by which moral results can be secured 
in the regular course of education, moral materials slipped into the educa- 
tional activities without betraying their real character. But there is a 
conflict of opinion here. Can moral results be secured in such ways? 
At the International Moral Congress of 1908 this question aroused long 
debate. Canon Glazebrook held that moral instruction could come only 
from history, literature, and the Bible. To try to get moral lessons out 
of arithmetic was to revive the errors of Pythagoreanism. But Mr. Gustav 
Spiller held that all subjects might be made to yield ethical lessons without 
violating the facts. Mr. Gautrey, of the London Teachers' Association, 
held that moral education of the child should permeate the whole course 
of instruction. It should not be confined to particular lessons, but it should 
be the atmosphere, the spirit of the school. But he did not tell how this 
was to be brought about. 

But, on the other hand, can so-called "moral materials" be introduced 
into the school activity in such a way that they will produce moral results 
by indirection? Can morality be smuggled into a child? Several "sys- 
tems" have been proposed to this end. The "Brownlee System" centers 
the work of the school, for a month, around some "moral" word, e.g., 
temperance. This word is engraved on banners hung about the school- 
room, it is on banners carried in the school marchings, etc., and it is 
made the subject of five minutes' conversation in class, daily during the 
month. Living with this word for a month is supposed to teach it thor- 
oughly. It is explained" that the psychology underlying this is: "Thoughts 
are things"; i. e., if the child can be made to think the idea long enough 
he will become possessed of the idea. But, of course, the real psychology 
of the situation, in the majority of cases, will be that acts produce habits, 
and habits are impervious to mere ideas; so that before the end of the 
month most of the children will have become wholly immune to these 
extrinsic ideas. 

Another "system" of the same general character is the so-called "Fair- 
child System" — "The New Moral Instruction." The announcement 
of this system says: "Character has always been asserted by American 
educators to be the chief concern of education, but, heretofore, no satis- 
factory way of teaching morals has been available." But now "A new 



1 6 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

moral instruction which is surprisingly influential and interesting is offered 
for general use in American schools." This new system is explained as 
follows : 

(i) A short course of "illustrated morality lessons" as text lessons (i. e., a 
stereopticon lecture on morality). The photographs are all from real life and the 
moral convictions of the best people are explained in practical appKcation, so 
that the discussion seems important to the children, and carries influence. In 
time there will be a course of thirty-six, three for each year of primary, grammar, 
and high school. (2) A special instructor employed by the board of education 
in each large city, to deliver the illustrated lessons in school assembly halls through- 
out tile city. (3) Review and discussion, enforcing the assembly instruction, by 
teachers and principals. (4) A corps of traveling instructors to serve smaller 
cities, churches, settlements, etc., each assigned a district and headquarters. 
(5) A supply of text lessons to be provided by the Moral Education Board, an 
educational philanthropy representing all interests and self-supporting through 
rentals and lesson-fees. 

This plan comes recommended by many prominent citizens and educa- 
tors, and the Moral Education Board is made up of representative men and 
women from all parts of the country. These lectures have been given 
before audiences in many colleges, high schools, grade schools, churches, 
etc., and the testimonials presented show that a real effect has been pro- 
duced. Among the lecture titles are the following: "What I Am Going 
to Do When I'm Grown Up, or the Utility of Education"— to be given 
in the upper grammar grades; "The True Sportsman, Ethics of Athletic 
Games"— for the high school; and "What Men Think about Boy's 
Fights, or Problem of Personal Encounter"— for the lower grammar 
grades. 

There is no doubt that these lectures can be made to yield some valuable 
results. But it is too much to claim that this is a solution of the problem 
of moral education, or even of moral instruction. It has the inherent 
vice of all the traditional educational practices — it expects the child to 
absorb ready-made ideas. The fact that these ideas are the "moral con- 
victions of the best people" does not answer this criticism. The whole 
conception of modern education is centered in the creative activity of the 
child; certainly that activity cannot be dispensed with in this most intimate 
world of moral ideals. The real values of this system are to be found in 
the statement of one critic that it is a sort of "moral nickel theater." As 
an attempt to utilize the amusement methods of the cheap theaters for 
moral ends it has a wide field of possible usefulness. 

With no intention totally to condemn these efforts toward a more com- 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 1 7 

plete educational practice, it still may be pointed out that they show the 
survivals of antiquated points of view in the sciences which underlie educa- 
tion. The psychology of both the direct and indirect methods set forth 
above is of the association type — good psychological doctrine in the days 
of Herbart, i. e., in pre-evolutionary times. Its fundamental error was 
in its insistence upon the intellect as the primary factor in mental life, 
and its consequent ignoring of the logic of development, and the place of 
activity in the processes of growth, with its corollary, the idea as an instru- 
ment of control. The ethics of these systems shows a like error. There 
is an overemphasis upon the part which society contributes to the develop- 
ment of control, a burdening of the child beneath the weight of social 
habits and institutions, and a complete ignoring of the creative activity of 
the individual in the moral world. Over against all these attempted solu- 
tions of the problem of moral education we may set the simple statement 
of Professor Foerster: "The ethics of the future will be based upon the 
evolution of the inner life."^ 

There is one other interpretation of the present situation, with accom- 
panying tentative solution, that must be discussed before we leave this 
division of our subject. This discussion of the situation is especially 
worthy of consideration because it shows a tendency of educational thought 
and practice away from the extreme intellectualism of the previous systems 
and in the direction of a more functional interpretation and construction 
of the world. According to this present point of view, the solution of the 
present problem in education can be secured only by carrying the whole 
process of education back into a corporate community, resembling the 
primitive community-group, in which the educational activities shall be 
implicit in the whole organization of the group, and by means of which 
those activities and processes shall secure the immediacy of appeal, and the 
vitality of sanction which they held in the primitive group. It is held that 
if such a corporate life could be organized it would assure the completeness 
of education which primitive education possessed. 

In England, this ideal is appearing under the concept of the "cor- 
porate life of school."^ It has its warm defenders, especially in the great 
public schools, in which, since the days of Arnold at Rugby, something 
of this ideal has been present. The plan as at present operative has been 
described in detail in the literature. The school becomes a sort of organic 
and self-sufficient group, in which certain educational activities, forces, 

1 Bihliotheque du Congrbs International de Philosophic, Vol. II, pp. 403-12. 

2 See articles of J. J. Findlay and H. Bompas Smith in Moral Instruction and 
Training in Schools, edited by Professor M. E. Sadler (London, 1908). 



1 8 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

ideas, ideals, sentiments, and wills are active; and it results in the com- 
plete adaptation of the individual to the situation, or, in the event of his 
lack of adaptability, in his expulsion from the group. There is much to 
commend in the plan as proposed. There is need of a more unified world 
in which the early developmental processes can be carried on, in terms of 
the absorption of social habit rather than in the presence of the disintegrat- 
ing influences of the overstimulating conditions of the full blare of our 
world-life, today. 

But the general discussion of the proposition usually neglects or ignores 
the more fundamental fact that no isolated concrete community, such as a 
school, can fully represent the world of action today, and that, accordingly, 
the practice in social habits attained in such a community will not insure 
complete social functioning in the larger community of the world. Indeed, 
practical schoolmen in the English public schools are recognizing and calling 
attention to the practical failure of this proposed solution. At the Inter- 
national Moral Education Congress of 1 908 Sir Arthur Hort, headmaster of 
Harrow, asked: "Why does the sense of corporate life once gained in a 
miniature world not more often develop into patriotism and similar vir- 
tues?" And Professor Muirhead, before the same congress, said: 

The virtue of patriotism or solidarity, as taught and practiced in schools, is 
of a narrow and exclusive kind. It trains a boy to give himself up for his cricket 
club, his school, or afterward his college; but it rarely extends beyond the school 
or the college to the university or the country at large. A public-school boy will 
do a great deal if you appeal to him on the class side, but he is deaf to all appeals 
from his city, his county, or his country. 

This discussion has carried us into the heart of the psychological prob- 
lem of the possibility of "generalized habits," or the transfer of training 
from one field of activity to another, more or less related. The funda- 
mental reason why the public-school boy does not carry his school habits 
over into the world of action is to be found in the fact that there is a funda- 
mental difference between the school community and the world community, 
and habits are related to likeness of community. Habits built up in one 
community will function in another community sufficiently like the first 
to offer the sufficient stimuli. But the school community and the world 
community of the present are essentially unlike, and they cannot be made 
like by any such isolation of the school from life. The school community, 
as isolated in the English public schools, is a concrete community of the 
primitive sort, in some degree. But the world community of today is not 
concrete: it is highly abstract, both socially and scientifically. It gets a 
certain amount of concreteness in terms of transcontinental railroad lines, 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 1 9 

world-encircling steamship lines, telegraph and cable lines, wireless teleg- 
raphy, international diplomacy, world travel, international magazines, etc., 
but in the main it is a great abstraction. 

Now, recent experiments in the transfer of practice, i. e., habits, from 
one field to another, have shown that in so far as the habit can be mediated 
to consciousness in terms of its appropriate ideas, the transfer can be more 
or less successfully made; and as an educational principle, where the habit 
does find its expression in terms of ideas, the teacher may expect to find it 
actually carried over and applied in wider fields. But not alone does this 
give wider range of practice : it also, and this is the more important aspect 
of the case, gives a wider range of consciousness, a larger grasp of ideas and 
theoretical phases of experience, and consequently it allows the individual 
to enter more fully into that abstract community — the modern world. 

It would seem, accordingly, that not even the corporate life of school 
can be counted upon to solve our problem; for its results are partial on 
the side of practice, as the results of the traditional education are partial 
on the side of theory: the former ends in practice, in social adaptation, 
whereas the only satisfactory end of education, today, is adaptability; 
the latter, i. e., traditional education, ends in mere theory, whereas the 
acceptable end of modern education is theory at work in construction 
and reconstruction of the world — in control— in power to meet and mediate 
social changes. 

What, then, shall we say? It were, perhaps, too much to say what 
Bacon said to the men of his times who held to the older ways of looking 
at the world; but with much allowance for the violence of his language 
the point of his remark is still pertinent, especially the last sentence. He 
says: 

If there be any humility toward the Creator, any reverence for or disposition 
to magnify his work, any charity for man and anxiety to relieve his sorrows and 
necessities, any love of truth in nature, any hatred of darkness, any desire for the 
purification of the understanding, we might entreat men again and again to dis- 
card, or at least to set apart for a while, these'preposterous philosophies which have 
preferred theses to hypotheses, led experience captive and triumphed over the 
works of God, and to approach with humility and veneration to unroll the volume 
of creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed clean from 
opinions to study it in purity and integrity. For this (i. e., nature) is that sound 
and language which went forth into the whole world and did not incur the con- 
fusion of Babel; this should men study to be perfect in and becoming again as 
little children, condescend to take the alphabet of it into their hands, and spare 
no pains to unravel the interpretations thereof, but pursue it strenuously, and 
persevere even unto death {Nat. and Exp. Hist., Voll X, pp. 370, 371).. X 



20 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

Is it possible for us to take into our hands the alphabet of experience 
and, in terms of the foundation sciences, patiently linger and spare no 
pains in the effort to interpret the actual method of experience, and, in 
terms of its actual processes, to construct the broad lines, at least, of the 
educational theory which shall vitally and fruitfully determine educational 
practice? To this problem we must next turn. 



IV. THE NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION: 
AN ORGANIC STATEMENT 

The results we have reached may be briefly restated, as follows: There 
is a growing demand for educational reconstruction — a demand that has 
not yet achieved much, because of uncertainty of method and the need of 
keeping the machinery moving. There has been much reconstruction of 
educational theory, but this reform has not penetrated deeply enough into 
the common consciousness to result in consistent reforms in practice; 
nor has the reform in theory carried with it the definite condition that its 
acceptance will presuppose a complete revolution in educational practice. 
There is much unrest, much talk about ideals, much longing for better 
things, much more or less naive effort to secure incidental reforms, much 
pseudo-scientific experimentation, much uncertainty as to what ought to 
be done, and but very little practical result. The press of affairs is bring- 
ing about innovations, some of which do not approve themselves to the 
best thought of the day. In the midst of the situation there is almost no 
large leadership — there are certain tendencies, and that is all. On the 
side of moral education there is a growing skepticism that expresses itself 
in the effort to secure moral training by some method of indirection. The 
need of the times seems to be a fundamental re-examination and recon- 
struction of the foundations of education, under the leadership of modern 
psychology, logic, and ethics, and a profound restatement of educational 
theory in terms of these results. This theory must be completely functional 
and instrumental, keeping close to the demands of both the world com- 
munity and the individual's processes of development. It must detail 
the processes by which, in concrete reality, the child attains the maturity 
of its "power on its own self and on the world" which is the mark of the 
educated man. In this study we cannot hope to cover the whole field. 
But on the basis of what has already been set forth we may be able to deal 
with so much of this field as may be necessary to show the organic founda- 
tions upon which a vital moral education must be grown, and the organic 
processes which must be used in promoting and securing that growth. 

Our foundational presuppositions are to be found in scientific recon- 
structions of psychology, logic, and ethics, whether this reconstruction "be 
termed pragmatism or be given the happier title of the applied and experi- 
mental habit of mind." Functional social psychology, instrumental logic,. 



22 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

and the ethics of the inner life of developing control — these must mark 
out our way. In the course of the argument the specific demands of each 
of these will be considered briefly. Here it is necessary to make a brief 
statement of the lack which is felt, and which the so-called "moral educa- 
tion" is expected to supply. It was pointed out in a previous section that 
much of our knowledge, today, is divorced from any real experience, that 
it is merely "erudition," in the invidious sense of that word; and that, 
on the other hand, much of our practical activity is merely "rule of thumb " 
practice, though the actual knowledge by which it can be made intelligent 
is probably within the experience of men, somewhere. It was shown that 
these two phases of experience are pointing the ways to two distinct tend- 
encies in education, one in the direction of theory, with little reference to 
practice; the other with an emphasis upon practice and with little care 
for the broader intelligence that can give practice its highest human mean- 
ing. Each of these is, of course, partial and illiberal. And we face the 
distinct problem of an education which shall include the good in each of 
them, and reduce the evil to its lowest terms. How shall the incomplete- 
ness of class education become the completeness of a really human sort of 
education? How shall this illiberal fragmentariness be done away, and 
the larger and more universal outlook and the more liberal spirit take its 
place ? The man of science, or art, or philosophy, is dependent upon the 
world of industry in a way that, at present, he does not like, always, to 
admit; the man who labors with his hands is dependent upon the man 
of ideas, the world of theory, in a way that, for the most part, he neither 
realizes, nor cares to consider. We need not discuss which is the more 
immoral, the snobbish superiority of theory to practice, or the pathetic 
glorying of practice in its "practicality." Both are serious. The world is 
one community, today; and this adds to the complexity of this problem: 
there are social relationships upon which we are all dependent, but of which 
we are all more or less ignorant, and upon which we do not always choose 
to inform ourselves. The lack in either case is much the same, though 
seen from different points of view. The man of science needs to become 
conscious of those elements in the social world which the workingman is 
contributing to his welfare, and to interpret those contributions, not in 
terms of impersonal relationships, but as the contributions of personalities, 
selves, like himself, to whom he owes the same sort of moral responsibility 
that he exacts from them ; and the workingman needs to become conscious 
of the implicit relationships of dependency which he sustains to the man of 
the other class: each — ^both — need a developing social consciousness, in 
which these implicit relationships will be coming more and more into explicit 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 23 

realization — into the determination of the larger sense of social fellowship 
and responsibility, and in which each shall be interpreted as a personality 
to the other — no longer as mere means to life, but now as ends in themselves, 
and fellow-members of the social "kingdom of ends." 

Tentatively, and in brief, then, we may say that the lack which "moral 
education" is expected to supply is that social consciousness in which the 
self and all other selves that relate to the world of the self shall appear explicitly, 
and in terms of which individual responsibility shall become identified with 
the social good. And this shall serve as the definition of the "moral" 
which is sought for education, until we shall have developed the argument 
to a point where more detailed statements are possible. It will not be 
denied that this is an essential constituent of education, and that an inquiry 
which seeks to determine the organic foundations of this constituent, and 
the method of making it real in educational results, is pertinent to the 
situation, today, even though such an inquiry must neglect certain very 
valid elements in the general problem. For, whatever the end which any 
particular interest in education may have in view — profession, trade, 
vocation, knowledge, culture, or any other end — this element which is 
here called the "moral" has full right to come in, either as a supplementary 
end in itself, or as an integral part of the proposed end; indeed, it has not 
only the right to come in, but, rather, no education can be called more than 
mere instruction which does not contain it. 

Stated formally, then, the end that is sought in the effort to make educa- 
tion moral is the development of a social self-consciousness which not only 
implicitly receives, but explicitly understands and gives in return. But 
this formal statement must be given fuller meaning. Psychology must 
be asked to give the concrete setting of this consciousness in individual and 
social living; ethics must be appealed to, to give it content of personal pur- 
pose and social relationships ; and logic must come in to give the method of 
the concrete realization of this content in actual social practice, i. e., in 
educational activities. These will be taken up in order, and the effort 
will be made to set forth the organic and functional relationships of this 
educational end to the whole of the concrete and developing experience. 

A. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW FOR MORAL EDUCATION 

The central aim in education — the aim which the emphasis upon the 
moral really represents — is the self, in its world of social and physical 
relationships, and conscious of the existence and meaning of those relation- 
ships in terms of its own experience. This central concept of the self is 
the object of knowledge of social psychology. Social psychology attempts 



24 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

to trace out the actual conditions under which, and the intimate processes 
by which, the self, or selves, of concrete experience, i. e., of social and 
moral relationships, arise in consciousness. General functional psychology 
deals with what it calls the "adaptation of the organism (human or other) 
to its environment." But education is interested in a much more intimate 
study: the actual development, enrichment, and adaptation in terms of 
rising levels of self-consciousness, of the selves of everyday experience. 
The so-called "educational psychology" of the past has been, in large 
degree, a description of processes that seem to be going on inside the individ- 
ual. But educational practice really needs a psychology which can deal 
with the individual and his development as integral parts of the general 
evolutionary process, and as a potential member of the social world. Social 
psychology is at present attempting to work its way through this field. Its 
results are not conclusive as yet, but a rich field has been opened up ; and 
the general spirit and purpose make it most available as an aid to educational 
activities. 

Genetically, the basis of the self is in the native activities, the instincts 
and impulses of the child. This activity is the presupposition of conscious- 
ness, and an ever-increasing complexity of activity is the presupposition of 
self-consciousness and its development into a social world. Rather, when 
the self finally rises into consciousness, the social world is already there — 
the self and the other rise into consciousness together. This is true also 
of consciousness of objects. In the earliest life of the child consciousness 
"must be relatively as unorganized and lacking in definite meanings as 

are the overt activities that go along with it At first undefined, it 

grows in definiteness of reference of content as activity becomes more and 
more complex." That is to say, consciousness grows in terms of the 
activity by which growing experience constructs the world. This construct- 
ive activity has a twofold reference. Comenius speaks of an "old proverb" 
which says: "We give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same 
time." The activity of the child is, from the very first, constructive. It 
is giving form and meaning to the objects and persons which make up its 
implicit environment; at the same time it is giving content and definition 
to the consciousness which is slowly becoming organized into an intelligible 
world. 

Consciousness rises at the point of failure of instincts to secure the sort 
of experience which the moving current of activity expects. Tensions of 
this sort begin early. Each such situation requires an increment of organ- 
ization for its solution. Out of the growing aggregate of these increments 
the central "core" of constructed powers is organized. But each such 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 25 

intensified situation carries with it a degree of emotional disturbance. 
This emotion serves a double purpose, related to the twofold nature of the 
creative activity which is here present. On the one hand, the emotion 
serves to evaluate the conflicting terms in the situation, and to give to expe- 
rience a standard of value to be used in the choice of ends, or in the con- 
struction of a unified end : thus does emotion function in the construction 
of the world by insuring a world that shall have value to the self. On the 
other hand, this emotional situation really consists in the struggle of these 
ends to be realized as possible selves: it is a struggle between potential 
selves, and out of this struggle a new and larger self will actually appear, 
an integral part of which will be the increment of emotional value which 
the struggle created: thus does emotion function in the building-up of the 
self, by making it equal in value to the world it has created. Thus the 
self and the world arise together in consciousness: the values which are 
present in the one are present in the other also, for those values arose 
together in those various creative experiences out of which both the self 
and the world have grown. 

Now, primarily, consciousness is social in character; i. e., the first 
stage in the development of the conflict which conditions the appearance 
of consciousness is the emotional one, the stage in which impulses to activity, 
or ends of desire, appear as potential selves — as members of a social world. 
This is the prevailing character of the consciousness of the child and the 
primitive man: for these, the differentiation of objects as "things" as 
distinct from personalities has not yet taken place. And this differentiation 
does not take place until the individual has reached a degree of organiza- 
tion of his mental processes sufficient to assure the control of the materials 
by powers that can rise above the level of emotions, and look upon the 
situation as a whole, and assign to each element its proper place in that 
whole: personal and social elements to their place in the unification of 
the end of action, "things" to their place in determining the means by 
which that end is to be realized. This unified end gets new value, for it 
is the self that is to be; but it is also a less impulsive and more rational 
self, for it has been criticized in terms of the means of its realization; that 
is to say, is has definitely grown out of, and is intimately related to, the 
whole of the new experience-world. 

This differentiation of the social from the "thing" is not to be confused 
with the earlier implicit recognitions of the differences between my self 
and other selves, or the fact that my body is not continuous with other 
objects. The general feeling for these differences may be present early 
in experience, but not in terms of the definite differentiation between per- 



26 CURRENT THEORIES OE MORAL EDUCATION 

sons and things. This latter fact is rather late in making its appearance. 
With many it never becomes an assured fact; and it is easy for all of us 
to fall back into the attitude of primitive animism, and to present all the 
world, again, in terms of a social consciousness. This is what we actually 
do do in that first stage in the solution of problematic situations during 
which the conflicting ends occupy the whole attention, for these present 
themselves in emotional coloring and warmth as possible selves, i. e., in 
a social setting. The complete differentiation of these aspects of experi- 
ence is a function of the growing complexity of experience, of developing 
consciousness, of power to present the world as a whole and in parts, of 
mature consciousness. 

The point to be emphasized here, constantly, is this, therefore, that the 
self does not exist, ready made, with powers that are to be trained. For 
social psychology, and for education, too, the self and the world arise together 
in consciousness; the powers of the self have to he developed, through the 
development of a world calling for those powers. The self reflects the world 
that it lives in, i. e., that has risen into consciousness with it. Education 
has, accordingly, the problem of providing for such creative situations in 
the developing experience as shall insure the rise of the larger self, and the 
more inclusive world. "The function of education in a progressive nation 
is not merely to develop habits suited to a present condition of life, but 
also to develop adaptability that will enable the individual to fit. himself 
to new conditions as they appear. But adaptability is a function, not of 
habit or instinct, but of attention, of intelligence, of consciousness." 

Two phases of this situation obviously differentiate themselves at this 
point. The first has to do with the conditions and processes of develop- 
ment by which the child grows from its early undifferentiated status to 
its later consciousness of self and its specialized power over the world. 
This is specifically the problem of the logic of experience and will be taken 
up in detail in its proper place. The second phase of the situation has to 
do with the way in which the mature individual achieves that complete 
differentiation of personal and impersonal elements which gives concrete 
content to his social self -consciousness and actually makes him a completely 
moral being. This, of course, cannot be completely differentiated from the 
logical problem: in concrete experience all these elements join to make the 
concrete unity of life and experience. But under the discussion of the 
ethical problem in education we shall deal with this phase of the complete 
process of development. It thus becomes apparent how soon the problem 
of psychology becomes differentiated into these more special problems. A 
complete discussion of this situation would demand the consideration of 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 27 

the aesthetic phase of experience, also, but this would unduly prolong the 
treatment, though the point of view will be briefly treated. 

With a final word as to the problem of education from the point of 
view of social psychology, we shall turn to the other special phases of the 
discussion. From this point of view, education is seen to be the slow devel- 
opment and differentiation of experience on the basis of the native activities, 
instincts, and impulses. On the basis of these native powers habits are 
slowly organized, which bring an ever-increasing range of the world under 
the power of experience. But the world is increasingly complex, and 
instincts, impulses, and habits will be continually breaking down, and 
experience will be thrown back upon the necessity of reconstruction, 
which will involve the rise in consciousness of a fuller social world, and in 
time the differentiation of the world of ends from the world of mere means 
to those ends; but this development will also be both cause and effect of 
the development of the perceptual, presentational, imaginative, conceptual, 
reflective, and judging powers, as distinct from the mere feelings and the 
overpowering emotions. All these powers can be abstracted from their 
setting in concrete activity, and can be made the objects of education or 
training: thus, in the past, has education been intellectualized, and life has 
been robbed of its concrete content. Ideas have been presented as pre-existent 
— emotional and religious sanctions have been appealed to, to give these for- 
mal ideas and powers logical value in experience, and the whole world has 
been turned upside down, because of a mistaken point of view in psychology. 
Today, educational psychology ought to become the technique of the 
organization of developing experience, with the conscious power to keep 
that experience constantly related to the real world of action, yet as 
constantly integral within its own but partially developed content and 
power. In this way will the teacher be able to see and to control the 
correlative developments of the self and the world in the consciousness of 
the child, and to make sure "that the child's real world shall be a world of 
its own constructive experience, within which it can move increasingly as 
master. Thus will the conscious world always be the correlate of con- 
structive differentiations within the experience. And thus will need of a 
reconstructive attitude toward experience be built up and always main- 
tained. And thus will the moral end of a social consciousness and power of 
adaptability be secured. 

We must now turn to the problem of stating the more complete content 
of these formal terms that we have been using to this point. That content 
will appear in the discussion of the ethical point of view, and that will set 
our next problem. 



28 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

B. THE ETHICAL POINT OF VIEW: THE CONTENT OF MORAL EDUCATION 

"Mental development is, at its best, the revelation of an expanding, 
variegated, and beautiful whole, of which the right act is a harmonious 
member." But it is difficult for moral education, or for any sort of educa- 
tion, save, perhaps, aesthetic education, to take any such developmental 
point of view. It seems so evident and obvious that the world has wrought 
out certain results which exist for the individual, and there is a general 
feeling that what the world has once done, the individual may be excused 
from doing. We are the " heirs of the ages " ; we "stand upon the shoulders 
of all the past" — this is the general point of view. Over against this we 
need to remind ourselves that, as Professor Foerster says, "the ethics of 
the future will be based on the evolution of the inner life." Our problem 
is to give this evolving inner life content, and to point out the pedagogy 
of this point of view. 

It is a fundamental postulate of modern ethical theory that the moral 
life is an achievement of the individual— of course in the midst of a social 
world — that the moral values of the world's experience become values in 
the individual's experience only as he re-creates them in vital situations which 
his own experience unfolds; and that these values arise in terms of the 
same logic of experience that brings about the development of our so-called 
scientific values.^ This last point will be dealt with later: here we are 
concerned with the actual content of the moral life as it grows in concrete 
experience. 

It is the business of modern ethics to give the historical and the psycho- 
logical description of the processes by which moral values are realized. 
But in the main, no dogmatic statements as to the actual content of morality 
are made. "The student is put in a position to judge the problems of 
conduct for himself. This emancipation and enlightment of individual 
judgment is the chief aim of theoretical (ethics)."^ 

From this point of view the question of content seems futile ; and yet it 
seems to be just the most necessary of questions for the educator: What 
shall be the content of moral education ? 

In order to make the problem more specific, let us note that the common 
point of view referred to above posits a certain mass of materials which 
are by nature moral, and which it is the business of moral education to 
inculcate. We have seen this method in detail in a former section. Moral 
precepts, rules, and ideals are to be forced into the individual, in some way; 

1 For a full discussion of this point see Stuart's essay, "Valuation as a Logical 
Process," in Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, p. 227. 

2 Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, pp. iv and v. 



NATURE OF THE MORAL EST EDUCATION 29 

usually this has been accomplished in terms of mere memorizing which 
goes no farther than a parrot-habit which can repeat the words, when the 
proper stimulus is given. And, when this defect is pointed out, the ready- 
answer is, that the memory will hold these things until such a time as the 
experience will be in need of them, and then they will spring into life and 
vitality of meaning; or, at any rate, while the child is learning these good 
things, he is kept out of mischief. 

Of course, there is a good bit of fundamentally bad psychology in this 
statement. Comenius pointed out long ago that "actual knowledge, 
virtue, and piety are not given to men. These must be acquired by educa- 
tion, by action, and by prayer." And our more recent psychology and 
logic of ethics has shown that the genuineness and reality of the ethical 
values depends upon their vital connections within experience, and their 
relevancy to the situation in which they are supposed to function. Recalling 
our discussion of the rise of the self, or of selves, in the previous section, 
we may say of precepts, or rules, or ideas of any sort, that they have value 
for the developing self only in so far as the self which uses them is identi- 
fied with the self which gives them. That is to say, if the precept calls 
for action — and of course, it is valueless otherwise — it becomes a social 
element, i. e., it is the heart, or the will, of a self acting in a social world, 
and it is only as this precept-self is actually identified with the self whose 
experience wrought out the precept that it actually enters into an experience 
that has content of meaning. At any rate it is certain that the child does 
not and cannot make use of the impersonal precept, for the child lives in a 
social world as yet, and cannot understand the language that is talked 
down to it from that level of abstraction where the personal and the imper- 
sonal have been fully differentiated. 

Again, from this standpoint of the moral as material which already exists, 
we have the constant problem of working up the motive forces which can 
make this "moral knowledge" become real in moral action. This is an 
age-long problem. In that first great break between the world of immedi- 
ate experience and the world of social theory, which grew out of the question- 
ings of the sophists and the work of Socrates and Plato, this question arose : 
ideas are standing over against the immediacy of experience; the ideas seem 
good to some, but the many seem to be able to get along very well without 
them; how can idea and experience be brought together — can the Good be 
taught? The problem comes to mean: Can the controlling ideas which 
will some day be needed in order to lift the self out of its genetic thrall 
to immediate impulses, instincts, and the developing world of habits; or 
by which its immediate experience and its power over the world in prac- 



30 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

tice will be saved from overwhelming multitudes of mere instances — 
can those ideas be taught before the life has need of them ? Of course, 
this question is based on bad psychology and on mistaken conception as 
to the nature of the Good — though these mistakes are really identical. 
The mind of the child does not peer into the future, or into experience 
outside its own range, for ideas, precepts, or rules that may some time 
meet some problem which has not yet arisen. Not only can one not learn 
what he is going to need at some future time (until one has formed a life- 
purpose and has centered his learning about the generalizations of his 
specific problem), but he cannot even guess at it in any exact way, for unless 
he allows his life to settle down into the impassiveness of the habitual 
and the mechanical, the future will be full of problematic situations, and 
there is always something new in every problem which cannot possibly be 
predicted in advance. Rules have value in the experience which has pro- 
duced them, or which can reproduce them. What is actually to be desired, 
rather than these pre-existent ideas, is a rich and fertile experience out of 
which will arise the appropriate materials for the solution of any problem. 

But this last statement gives us the cue we desire for the definition of 
the content of the moral for education. If the good is relevant to the 
activity-situation, and the solution of the problem must rise out of experi- 
ence itself, then the content of the good must be not a content of materials 
but a content of method of dealing with experience situations. Professor 
Dewey has said that that which gives moral quality to any situation is the 
necessity for asking the question: "What is the action that is demanded 
at this point?" and that which brings in the "good" is the asking, and 
satisfactory answering of these questions: "What are the conditions which 
demand action ?" and, "What is the action that these conditions demand ?" 

That is to say, the "good" is not in some specific act, or in some specific 
way of thinking, or in some precept or rule that is to be made to apply 
at this point. The good is in the actual grasp of the situation, taking 
into account all the conditions that are in question and all the elements 
that demand consideration, and all the values that are presented in con- 
sciousness; and in working out from these a completely unified end, which 
shall be criticized in terms of the means for its realization, and which 
will be, accordingly, related to the world of action. Cooley says: "The 

right is the rational in the large sense of the word The right is 

the result of the mind's full work in grappling with a problem. "' The 
right is in mental integrity. 

But when we have defined the good in terms of the method of experience 

I Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order. 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 3 1 

in attaining and maintaining its own integrity, we seem still to have neg- 
lected some factors. What of the relation of the individual and the social ? 
of the place of impulse, and the distinction between the "carnal" and the 
"spiritual"? As to this latter question, the answer lies in the foregoing 
account, and in the description of the method by which the self rises in a 
constantly differentiating consciousness. The moral problem that this 
question raises is no longer the question of the higher over against the 
lower, of will over against impulse, of the moral over against the sensual, 
of the rational over against the irrational. It is wholly a question of the 
organization of these earlier, and less conscious and less definite phases 
of experience into the world of the will, of the moral, of the rational. It 
is thus that modern psychology and ethics have overcome the old dualism 
between the higher and the lower, and given unity, or the promise of unity, 
to the inner life of man. But the logic of this process will be treated more 
fully later. 

As for the first problem noted above, the relation between the individual 
and the social, this method of regarding the problem is ready to answer 
that this old antithesis is no longer psychologically admissible. 

The process of mental development may be defined indifferently from the 
social or individual side. Every act that defines individuality, defines the con- 
sciousness of others also. There are no "special powers" by which the individual 

takes up social values Everything that tends to individualize and define 

experience tends to socialize it also. The two developments are absolutely cor- 
relative.' 

But, of course, this we have already seen to be the case in our discussion 
of the appearance of the self. 

Social psychology is perfectly sure of its position, here. "The social 
and moral reality is that which lives in our imaginations, and affects our 

motives." "The immediate social reality is the personal idea 

Society is a relation among personal ideas. "^ "Society is simply the 
collective aspect of personal thoughts." "Society is rather a phase of 
life than a thing by itself .... it is life regarded from the point of view 
of personal intercourse. "3 These are statements out of the most modern 
doctrine. But much the same idea can be found at least as far back as 
Hegel, e. g., "The state finds in ethical custom its direct and unrefiected 
existence, and its indirect and reflected existence in the self-consciousness 
of the individual." "The state .... is the realized substantive will 

I King, Psychology 0} Child Development, p. 131. 

- Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order. 

3 Ihid. 



32 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

having its reality in the particular self-consciousness raised to the plane 

of the universal The individual has his truth, real existence, and 

ethical status only in being a member of it."^ 

But if the objection still persists and the plea is made that the problem 
of ethics is, after all, the socialization of the individual; and that, therefore, 
the problem of moral education is to be stated in like terms, the answer 
is that this is just w^hat our argument has led to, but with reference to 
more fundamental results than the mere socialization of the individual. 
For the individual must be not only socialized, he must become an individual, 
not merely repeating or copying the world's life, but creative of experience- 
values in his own right and person. If we turn to the most recent treatise 
on the subject of the moral life,^ we shall find that a constantly increasing 
stress is laid on the intelligence of the individual, and those deeper pro- 
cesses, the impulses and affections, out of which the intelligence rises, 
together with the growing demand for the transformation of customary 
into reflective morality (which surely illustrates the point of the preceding 
argument) ; and, on the other hand, there is a constantly growing emphasis 
upon the social nature, or rather the generalized nature of the objects and 
ends to which personal preferences are to be devoted. Or, as Hegel would 
say: "The universal is the concern of every particular person. Every- 
thing depends upon the law of reason being incorporated thoroughly with 
the law of particular freedom. My particular end thus becomes identical 
with the universal." And Kant had said even before this: "Act always 
from a principle fit for a universal law." 

The contribution which modern ethical theory has made to these con- 
ceptions of Kant and Hegel is to be found in the modern idea of the moral 
as growing up out of, but organically connected with, all the other elements 
in the historical and psychological life. The purely instinctive in group 
or individual life becomes the customary, or the habitual; and this in turn 
becomes the personal, the intelligent, and the self-conscious.^ There is 
progress here, but no break of continuity, and no dualism. This makes 
the problem of moral education more simple and its solution much more 
possible. 

Thus, we have seen that the ethical is the rational, the intelligent, the 
grasp of conditions and control from within, the conscious self that answers 
to the actual conditions in the world of action. The final demand of the 
moral life, and, accordingly, of moral education, is this: that the process 

1 Hegel, Philosophy oj Right. 

2 Dewey and Tufts, Ethics. 

3 Ihid. 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 33 

of experience through the plastic years shall result in the complete organi- 
zation of the processes of reflection so that the individual may be prepared 
to apply his experience at any point where moral tension may arise. All 
the contents of experience are moral as they minister to the felt needs of 
life. But not all contents are usable, for to too great a degree contents are 
taken on as so much good in themselves, or as future ministers of good, 
without submitting to the logic of constructive experience. Conscious- 
ness, intelligence, organization of the contents of experience to fit them to 
the uses of experience, and the organization of the reflective powers by 
means of this organization of the contents of experience — all these are 
bound up together in the processes of concrete experience, and are functions 
of the developing self. The fullest development of these is the aim of 
education, in general, but the particular interest of moral education. 

One word more. Nothing has been said, in this section, about ideals, 
or purposes, or character, or the necessity that is supposed to underlie 
both education and morality. The foundation of this discussion has been 
the fundamental presupposition of activity — the necessity of action which 
inheres in experience itself, and without which there could be no experience. 
All life is experience, and all experience is educative: the necessity which 
underlies education is found in the question of the psychologist: "Why 
is experience always reaching out, persistently trying to define itself more 
and more adequately ?" and the answer is given in the words of the ethical 
philosopher:^ "The moral necessity for education .... is the necessity 
for knowledge to do what is trying to be done, the dependence of the unin- 
formed impulse upon means, method, and interpretation." Experience will 
and must go on: why should education not accept that fact and build upon 
it, helping impulse to find its ideas, the growing will its defined aim, and 
the rising self its freedom by means of a growing consciousness of values 
and of controls ? Life evolves from within: why should not education work 
from within, develop from within ? Is not the dawning experience promise 
of the full world of the future ? Why should not education in all its phases 
become moral by aiming to secure to the developing experience the possi- 
bility of constructive and reconstructive organization by which, in its natural 
career, the ideals and purposes that it needs, the world in which to realize 
those ideals and purposes, the controls that will make it socially acceptable, 
and the self-consciousness that will make it socially inclusive and respon- 
sive, will all he developed ? 

To the more detailed logic of this process we must now turn. 

I Mead, "Philosophical Basis of Ethics," International Journal of Ethics, A-pri\, 



34 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

C. THE LOGIC OF MORAL EDUCATION 

In a previous section a brief sketch of the character of experience in 
the modern world as distinguished from the more primitive forms of expe- 
rience was given. A brief elaboration of that description is called for at 
this point. Traditional educational practice has naively proceeded on 
the implicit, if not explicit, assumption that the world of the adult experi- 
ence has objective existence — as much for the child as for the mature man; 
and the logic of that objective world has seemed to be that its existence 
lay in a mass of particulars, each with its possible appropriate "idea"; 
and education was just the process of acquiring those ideas, one by one — 
"line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little." 
An unfortunate but rather natural misunderstanding of the Herbartian 
doctrine of apperception has helped to continue that logical error almost 
to the present, in education; and it has given the scientific foundation for 
the doctrine of "direct" instruction in morals. 

Opposed to this lies the whole interpretation of experience from the 
point of view of functional psychology and instrumental logic. These 
sciences begin with the activity of experience as fundamental, and they 
point out how in the creative and re-creative processes of experience the 
world of objective reality is built up. This we have already seen to be 
the case: the social and the physical worlds are constructs of experience, 
arising in consciousness, evolving from within, and taking on the charac- 
ters which the conditions of experience compel them to assume. Experi- 
ence is fundamental, and creative, not merely secondary and acquisitive. 

But experience has two general nodes: the instinctive or habitual 
and the attentive or reconstructive. In the primitive world instincts and 
habits mediate the whole content of experience, save, perhaps, that recon- 
struction which takes place in the period of adolescence and which is 
given such social significance by the ceremonials of many primitive groups. 
But the complexity of our modern world is constantly intruding upon the 
fixed forms of habit, and compelling the reconstructive processes of atten- 
tion to function: this is the heart of modern world-creativeness, both on 
the side of the social contents and in terms of "things." Thus do society 
and the physical world slowly develop in the consciousness of the indi- 
vidual: not by the mere addition of atoms, particulars, facts; but by 
the creative differentiations within habits and objects that have, hitherto, 
functioned satisfactorily. 

There are three specific levels of this logical development, correspond- 
ing to the three levels of development of the moral order of experience, 
noted above. Experience begins in instinctive and impulsive forms. 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 35 

These practically fulfil the description of Kant: they are "forms without 
content"; i. e., they are responses, modes of activity, inherited "categories" 
without definite or determined stimuli. (A few do have fixed stimuli 
from the first.) Corresponding to these "forms" the child manifests 
what Professor Dewey has called "direct attention," i.e., "attention" 
is focused wholly upon the outgoing activity: there is no discrimination 
of stimuli, in the conscious sense: only a sort of blind seeking for content 
to fill the forms that are ready to be filled. The child is absorbing the 
world. There is a sort of discrimination present, however; it is of the 
same sort which the chick displays when it rejects the orange-peel and 
swallows the egg-yolk, and, eventually, disregards the orange-peel alto- 
gether, though always accepting the other. This form of discrimination 
is the foundation of all the world-creative discriminations and reconstruc- 
tions of the developing experience. 

Instincts become "filled" with this discriminated content of the implicit 
environment: these filled instincts, or instincts with their stimuli deter- 
mined, or instincts organized into the structure of the social and physical 
world, are habits. And here we have risen to the second level of develop- 
ment. But the child reaches this level only through the compulsion which 
appears in the struggles between instincts to get themselves established 
in the world of actual content. In those preconscious conflicts and recon- 
structions the tools are being forged with which the more complex conditions 
of experience are to be conquered. Sensation is present from the first, 
of course. But sensation slowly organizes itself into perception under the 
demand of the growing experience for a world of meaningful content. 
But the child must learn to perceive, as truly as he must learn to reason. 
A perception is a real content of meaning singled out of the "booming, 
buzzing confusion" of sensation. But perception involves memory, and the 
beginnings of judgment, and primitive forms of imagination, and the 
powers of abstraction and reflection. And so, with the appearance of 
this level of perception, we have the beginnings of the distinctively human 
period, the perceptual order, and the roots of that world-constructive con- 
sciousness in which the self, the social order, and the world of means will 
appear. Experience will now begin to take on the forms of "attitudes," 
and the discriminated instincts will appear under the forms of "categories 
of the understanding." 

On this second level, experience will be organized in the general forms 
of social habit, and the general relationships to the social order will be in 
terms of a customary morality; not, indeed, the mere customary morality 
of the primitive man — for the life of the child in the modern world is con- 



36 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

ditioned by forces which the primitive man did not know; so that the moral- 
ity of the child in the years from three to ten will be that of his immediate 
society, conditioned by the implicit creativeness of his own reactions upon 
those forms: he feels the fact of social organization all about him, but he 
does not feel its meaning. Perhaps it could be said of the primitive man 
that in this customary or habitual stage — the mature stage of his experience — 
he feels the meaning of social organization, but does not feel the fact. 

The life of the child expresses itself in this period in the form of volun- 
tary activities, in which attention is directed to the working-out of some 
practical end. The great word for this whole period is "practice." Regu- 
lations, theories, ideas, moral controls are all more or less unnatural, 
extra-experiential, and meaningless, and he seeks to keep out of their 
way, in so far as they are obtruded upon him from without. None the 
less, he welcomes ideas, theories, powers of control, that arise within the 
practical situations which he confronts and which justify themselves to 
him as a means for the extension or the control of experience to the ends 
that he seeks. 

But the whole of his experience is social, i. e., it comes in terms of emo- 
tions and feelings, rather than in terms of ideas and complete controls. 
Reconstructions take place, of course, but these reconstructions possess 
him, rather than vice versa. Yet, of course, the slow processes of time are 
organizing the powers which will carry him into the distinctive character- 
istics of the next period. 

In the next general period the child passes into the fulness of personality, 
of personal and intelligent morality, and into the expression of his life in 
terms of a reflective attention that is able to rise above the levels of feeling 
and emotion and to reconstruct the world as a complete and unified experi- 
ence. The whole social order, including the personal self, has risen into 
consciousness, and has been differentiated from the world of physical 
things. The power to grasp the conditions of a problem, to carry the solu- 
tion through all its various levels, and to actualize the self of the complete 
organization of the situation marks the level of logical and moral maturity, 
the completion of "education" in the preparatory sense, and the capacity of 
the individual for complete assumption of the responsibilities of member- 
ship in a moving society. 

But it is to be noted that he is not merely an individual in the narrow 
sense of that term. He has developed in the midst of social situations, 
he has come into conflict with social institutions, and has been compelled 
to adjust himself continually to new phases of the life of society. He has 
found his growing, evolving self in and through his finding of these social 



NATURE OF THE MORAL IN EDUCATION 37 

conditions, and in the resistance which he has constantly felt in society 
he has been compelled to remake himself continually, constantly to "criti- 
cize his categories." The results are apparent. Every increment of the 
self has been correlative to an increment in the social order which is his 
creation of society. Society has become a correlative part of his unified 
world of action. 

Corresponding to these three levels of logical development, and of 
moral control, we may note three levels in the " method of reflection, " 
the complete organization of which was set down as the specific end of 
education. Experience grows through reconstructions in the presence of 
conflict-situations. Reflection comes, finally, to be the method of this 
reconstructive process, this power of adaptation. The foundations of 
reflection were pointed out in that primitive discrimination which the child 
shares with the chick. The mature development of this power lies impli- 
citly in the organization of experience through the plastic years. In its 
complete organization we may note three levels. 

The problem begins in the deep undercurrents of experience which 
lie far back in the predispositions, instincts, and habits of experience. This 
is still an obscure field — the particular province of genetic logic. But in 
some way currents of experience cross each other and inhibit the on-going 
activity. Inhibitions arouse emotions, and in terms of emotional pres- 
entations these conflicting currents of experience rise into consciousness. 
This is the second level. Here the struggle is between ends which clothe 
themselves in all the warmth of emotion and actually present themselves 
as "selves," possible future selves. An older ethical theory looked upon 
this situation as the final stage in the moral struggle, and demanded that 
choice should here be made of one or the other of these selves, as the only 
solution of the moral situation in moral terms. But to choose one of these 
selves, and to identify the present with that one only, is to ignore the values 
which give the other self power of appeal. Unless moral choice is to be 
made to include conscious and deliberate exclusion of genuine values, the 
only completely moral way to resolve the situation is to carry the whole 
conflict to a higher level (the third), and in the quiet of control which the 
reflective power gives, to organize all these values into a unified end which 
shall become the object of achievement, the self that is to be actualized. 
But reflection must do more than merely organize those values; it must 
organize them in terms of the means available for their realization. It 
must more clearly define the difference between the end in its relation to 
the more clearly defined social "kingdom of ends," and the world of mere 
means, the scientific phase of experience — the physical order. 



38 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

The power to rise to this level of insight and discrimination and to 
state the problematic in terms of a complete differentiation of its various 
levels of elements is both a logical and a moral power. The distinction 
between the two lies only in the fact that the moral has to do with the 
organization of the end, while the logical has to do with the organization of 
means to that end: but both are united in an organic whole. And that 
whole is the end which a completely moral education seeks. 

But if objection be made that this is a purely formal end, lacking con- 
tent and not emphasizing "character" and "ideals," the reply must again 
be made that such an end as this is realized only on the basis of the richness 
of personal experience which is the real content of life, and organization 
such as this is the very essence of that character which is able to "stand 
four-square to every wind that blows." And by giving vital meaning to 
the "idea"; by relating ideas to the initiatory impulses in organic fashion; 
by giving to the impulse this determinate outlet through ideas into a world 
of human meanings: by thus organizing the whole process of experience 
a real place is made in experience for that genuine ideal that "grows for- 
ever as we move." But especially does this way of looking at the whole 
matter do away with the fallacy of the existence of an objective world 
which needs to be acquired, and it gives to experience the quality which 
belongs in experience — personal creativeness. The moral world thus 
comes to possess the same reality as the physical world possesses; or even 
a greater reality, at least a prior reality, as being that for which the physical 
world is constructed — the end to which all else is means. 

And education, whether from the logical or the moral point of view, 
becomes the ability to originate and apply constructively interpretative 
ideas at the point of action. Thus is life freed in all its elements; there is 
no need of external repression, for all the primitive forces have been organ- 
ized into the control of the reflective processes, giving all the power which 
the primitive man possesses room, but subordinating it all in organic ways 
to the control of the idea-producing capacity of experience itself. 



V. THE LOGIC OF SCHOOL 

The foundations of all education are social. The child does not acquire 
a social consciousness or a consciousness of the social world. His first 
sense of self is called out by the presence of other selves. The whole process 
of education goes on in this social world. But consciousness grades down 
from the central region of clear and explicit meanings and controls to the 
fringe of uncertainties and the merest implications of meanings. Under 
the stress of life -conditions experience is constantly pushing back the 
boundaries of the clear and explicit and drawing within its central light 
the shadowy phases of the implicit: not in any arbitrary way, but as the 
actual needs of life require. Psychologically, this means the development 
of a more concrete self, and a more determined social and physical world 
in which that self may live ; ethically, it means a richer store of experience 
with which to control the future conditions of experience, and a clearer 
consciousness of the complex elements that make up moral experience; 
logically, it means the growing organization of the reflective powers and the 
ability to carry through to ever-more- complete ends the processes of recon- 
struction in experience and of moral and physical world-creativeness. 
Educationally, it means the entrance into more and more of the ''experi- 
ence of the race," the "rich inheritance of the past," the "understanding 
of the present social order," or whatever other method of description befits 
the obvious fact. 

Actually, the individual, child or man, lives in two worlds — the actual 
world of his own concrete experience, his own explicit world of moral 
and logical controls, represented by the general field of consciousness; and 
that implicit and unknown larger world of social and physical support and 
coercion, which lies dimly in the fringe of consciousness with its intimations 
of experience beyond the present, which rises into logical and moral mean- 
ing and objectivity in the reconstructive developments of experience, and 
which we may call the pedagogical world. To be sure, this pedagogical 
world is more or less of an abstraction, a "possibility of further experi- 
ence"; but from the point of view of education it is a very real world. 
It is an abstraction in terms of the experience which has not yet come to 
include it. 

We all feel the presence of this larger world, in some degree, today; we 
have the implicit sense of being "hustled" by forces that are beyond us. 

39 



40 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

Experience contains elements that have not been rationally organized and 
brought under the control of our central life-purposes. These elements 
are an index of our worldwide life. Institutions are methods which experi- 
ence originates for the purpose of keeping rational control over growing 
complications within experience. Experience seeks to attain, and to 
maintain, a unified development. The sense of being "hustled" is an 
indication that this unity has not been attained. Its logical purpose is to 
spur experience on to more strenuous efforts in the direction of attaining 
unity. But, when this feeling becomes overwhelming; when the instru- 
ments of organization seem to fail, and no new instruments are at hand, and 
the experience possesses no power to work out new instruments or methods 
— in any such case as this, experience is compelled to secure its unity by a 
definitely immoral method of excluding some of the elements of experience, 
even when those elements possess logical values. Thus is many a child 
shut out from the possibilities of participation in the world of ideas and 
ideal controls, by the overwhelming pressure of circumstance; and thus is 
many another child shut out from the participation in the realities of ideas, 
by the social pressure which destines him to the merely theoretical mastery 
of an existent world of theory, giving neither time nor stimulus to relate 
that world to practice. And to remedy these faults which are imposed 
upon the inner logical world of the individual by the outer pedagogical 
world, that outer pedagogical world— instead of reorganizing the logical 
instrumentalities, i. e., the institutions, by which to secure to that inner world 
a greater control over the processes of unified and inclusive world-con- 
structiveness — seems to be content, in large measure, to temporize with 
the whole matter by attempting a sort of extrinsic "moral education" 
which, under the circumstances, can do little to heal the great organic 
wound that the experience of multitudes of individuals is receiving today. 
Thus have we returned to the point from which we set out. 

What are those "logical instrumentalities" mentioned above as being 
the mediators of the larger world-experience to the developing experience 
of the child? They are, of course, innumerable. Compayre speaks of 
those which have not been institutionalized under the term, collahorateurs 
occultes, i. e., the innumerable forces of the world that play upon the life 
of the child, in implicit but very real ways. In general, we may say that 
these instrumentalities include every "influence that specializes the child's 
reactions and differentiates his world, and that at the same time increases 
his control over his own development."^ In the primitive world, none of 
these influences was specifically institutionalized, in its own right as related 

I King, Psychology of Child Development. 



THE LOGIC OF SCHOOL 4I 

to the child, except, perhaps, the definite organization of adolescent awaken- 
ings into a means of emphasizing the content of the social life, and the real- 
ity and responsibility of the social purpose. 

But when the primitive world of social habit was broken in upon by 
the growing complexity of social life, e. g., in Greece, these collaborateurs 
occuUes could no longer perform the more complicated task of maintaining 
the organic relatedness of the child- world to the larger social world: there 
were phases of this larger education that could not be intrusted to the 
implicit educative influences of social life alone. We mark the slow 
beginnings of educational institutions of various sorts, which are not con- 
sciously established but which grow as the problem grows. Among these, 
and most important of them, is the school, in some one of its many genetic 
forms. Logically, therefore, the school is an instrument which experience 
has attempted to develop, pari passu with the development of the problem. 
The problem was as follows. The world of social experience, i. e., the 
pedagogical world of the child, was beginning its definite specialization 
and dififerentiation into the forms of practice and theory, habit and idea; 
practice went on as did habit in the older world; but practice needed 
theory for its illumination. Now, it is perfectly legitimate for such differ- 
entiation to take place, provided the two phases of it are constantly related 
back to the unity of experience — theory existing only for the illumination 
of practice, and practice looking constantly for the larger interpretation 
that theory can bring. So long, then, as the unity of experience is main- 
tained, this differentiation of experience means the attainment of a larger 
content, a larger world, a more rich and varied selfhood, a more conscious 
control, and a larger organization of the powers of control, both logical 
and moral. 

But institutions develop slowly, and, once incased in substantial social 
habit, they may resist all development influences, save those insidious ones 
which are at the heart of the Zeitgeist. And they may even sever all con- 
nection, save a purely formal one, with the fundamental influences which 
produced them. The school developed as an extension of the organizing 
powers of the home and general social influence, to help mediate the grow- 
ing complexity of the world to the still simple experience of the child. At 
first its work was as immediately social as was the work of the home. Its 
foundations were in the implicit developments of the common social world. 
But the development of the social world, which determined the develop- 
ment of this extension of the educative instrumentalities of society, was in 
the direction of the theory of the social and physical worlds which grew up 
in the reconstructive processes of the times. The development of theory 



42 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

as a control in the reconstructive processes of society called forth the develop- 
ment of the school. All this was slow in its growth, but lasting in its 
effects. For, since the school grew out of theoretical needs, its mission 
was early conceived to be theoretical, rather than practical; or rather, 
since, and as long as, practice was provided for in the forms and activities 
that lay outside the school, the school was free to devote its energies to the 
theoretical aspects of the differentiation of experience; but always as these 
were determined out of the actual social foundations of life. 

But as the world grew more and more complex, the school became 
more and more institutionalized, rationalized, and fixed in its forms and 
methods. Its social foundations were more or less forgotten: its curricu- 
lum became conventionalized without explicit reference to the social 
world in which it was to function; curricula were transplanted from one 
social situation to another without thought of relevancy or vital connected- 
ness; and, especially, the whole work of the school came to be conceived of 
as the mediation of ideas from one generation to the next. This would 
not have been so disastrous had the logic of education been functional 
and genetic; but, of course, that was impossible. So the school has come 
down to us, changed in many important particulars, of course, and more 
and more yielding to change ; with many of its older features reconstructed 
in conformity with the modern world-spirit, but in large measure still 
meriting the criticism with which this study began. The old foundations 
of social practice, which formerly gave vitality to the formal curriculum 
of the school, are practically gone, and the school is left suspended in the 
air, with its theoretical curriculum revealed in all its formal barrenness; 
but at the vital heart of it, struggling to pull itself back to earth by all sorts 
of means — commercial courses, trade courses, manual training, "fads" 
of many sorts, and last, but not least, efforts at "moral education." 

It is evident that the institution of the school is no longer a type of 
that old organic instrument which at first mediated a growing world of 
theory to a growing world of practice in such a way that the result was a 
unified world of intelligent practice, or practical theory which was com- 
pletely at home in the world. The school has not widened and bre^dened, 
as the limits of theory and practice have widened and broadened The 
school has not kept itself close to its proper roots in the immediate social 
life of the community. Too intent on "culture" and "liberal education," 
it has finally found that it is unable to give to the child either liberal culture 
or intelligent practice, save in the case of the extraordinary child, whom 
it cannot keep out of its rightful kingdom. 

We have already seen that the school cannot be reconstructed as a sort 



THE LOGIC OF SCHOOL 43 

of isolated model community, imitating the larger world in some of its 
phases; for it is certain that those partial results cannot be depended upon, 
either to be carried over into the larger world, themselves, or to become 
the bases of organic world-habits suited to the larger situation. We have 
noted also that in the city life of today the older foundations of concrete 
social practice, the home and the social neighborhood, with their work 
and their social criticism, are practically gone. Thus is the old and origi- 
nal gap widened immeasurably. The educational institution, instead of 
being called upon to mediate between the world of ideas and the world of 
concrete practice, is now called upon to mediate a world of ideas to children 
whose basis of practical experience is woefully meager and insufficient. The 
problem of the school seems to be, or seems destined to become, that of 
providing in kindergarten and grades the very fundamentals of social 
practice, and to organize into that practice the interpretative ideals which 
the practice calls for and develops, and to make the whole of this educative 
situation develop in the direction of some specific vocation which shall 
be both practical and theoretical — that is, technically mastered and intelli- 
gently practiced. 

Such a school must, to be sure, be related to the actual present conditions 
and demands of social purpose and activity; it must be of the nature of 
the old apprenticeship schools, i. e., immediately subject to the pressures, 
coercion, support, and criticisms of the real social situation; yet it must 
be conceived broadly enough to make room for constructive development 
of the social and physical order of the world in experience, which has been 
described above as the real moral education. To this end, the real curricu- 
lum of the school must become, in the words of Professor Button, "the 
current of social activity that makes up the world." This social activity 
can be analyzed into its elements of practice and theory, and graded to the 
stages of the child's development; education will begin with practice, and 
by the successive enrichment of practice by means of ideas, and the actual- 
izing of ideas in terms of practice, the actual modern world can be so con- 
structed as to make possible, once more, the unity of experience; but now, 
under the leadership of intelligence. 

Such an educative activity will begin just where the child is, and it 
will base itself upon the principle that all experience is educative, not 
merely the experience of some classic past. It will attempt to build upon 
the child's own consciousness by organizing more and more of experience 
into the objective forms of control. With some children this will not be 
a problem of organizing a "situation" in the first place; for many children 
seem to delight in working out the deeper implications of their imperfect 



44 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

experiences; with others it will take the form of getting the child into a 
situation which will be real and interesting and from which the child cannot 
escape without actually getting the values which arise from the living 
and developing of that situation. It is to be understood that the foundation 
of a moral life is actual content of experience: there should be no great 
haste to get to the "moral" training. All experiences which are concrete 
and vital will minister to the later moral life. Educational situations must 
be of this character, and all that can be brought in to help the child to com- 
prehend the meanings of the experience, as relating it to nature and to 
human nature and to the social order, will help to make it more completely 
educative. 

And especially must the heart of the whole school work be the effort on 
the part of the teacher to secure to the child a real control of the method 
of experience. This is a delicate matter. It is very easy to make the child 
oversophisticated. The child's attention must be kept upon the content 
of experience, but the teacher's efforts must be constantly directed toward 
making that implicit content organize itself into definite forms, categories, 
controls, method of experience. It cannot be doubted that most of that 
which is called bad in boys and girls comes from the lack of method of 
handling new experiences. In the complexities of modern life; in the life 
of the street and the school; in the overwhelming complications of the 
educational collahorateurs occuUes which surround the child, new experi- 
ences are constantly being forced into attention: overstimulations and 
excitations which, in the lack of adequate powers of organization and con- 
trol, can have but one result: the child finds new experiences pleasant, 
and goes after them. 

Organization of control is slow, at first, for there must be large content 
out of which experience of control can arise. The child's world must be 
brought into the school, not some foreign world; or rather, the school, as 
an instrument of interpretation, of social control and criticism, of social 
support and compulsion, ought to be brought into the life of the child, 
organically at that point where the home begins to fail of performing these 
things completely. For the child's life and development must be inter- 
preted to its growing consciousness, it must be controlled and criticized by 
forces that appeal to the child as resident in the actual world of living 
reality, it must be supported and compelled to activity by elements that 
justify themselves to the child as intrinsic and not extrinsic and extra- 
neous. When the teacher and the curriculum and the social world of the 
school come to have these valid contents to the child, the isolation of the 
school will be a thing of the past. 



THE LOGIC OF SCHOOL 45 

Education must begin with the child's native endowments; but it 
will begin by seeking to free as wide a variety of these as possible, for the 
richness and variety of the personal life of maturity will depend upon the 
richness and variety of these native activities which are brought into actual 
functioning. The first six or seven years of life will be spent in organizing 
these activities into the social and physical environment, filling them with the 
concrete content of the world as it comes to the developmg experience of the 
child. It is, largely, in the richness and variety of this concrete content 
that the possibility of a later organization of life to moral ends is made 
possible. For, as before pointed out, consciousness, the larger sense of 
self, and the more complete organization of the reflective powers by which 
experience finds its complete control — these are all functions of those recon- 
structions which grow out of the conflicting conditions of experience. If 
life should embody but a single impulse or activity, it could never know 
more than this; its term would be spent in the service of this one aim. 
But a multitude of impulses and activities will be constantly conflicting 
and calling for reconstruction; and this will mean the possibility of the 
larger ends of education. 

In the preadolescent years, after six or seven, the child is actually 
engaged in organizing these preliminary materials. Ideas will be in demand, 
but they must be ideas that are actually vital to the situation. Activities 
will be most dominant, and the idea must always be the servant of the 
activity. Can the school be organized in these years around these dominant 
activity-motives of the child? Professor James declares that the book 
ought not to predominate until at least the fifteenth or sixteenth year.^ 
But what would our schools do under such a system ? There is a whole 
primitive world of activity and impulse and constructiveness and social 
content that needs no book for its mediation: it needs activity, opportunity, 
stimulus, social support, social criticism, social compelling, social inter- 
pretation; but it needs freedom for the development of the organizing 
powers of the individual experience, it needs silence, and length of time; 
and it needs release from those whom Browning speaks of — "The fools 
who crowded youth, nor let me feel alone." 

For the end of this period as it approaches the adolescent years with their 
profound emotional disturbances must see the child pretty definitely self- 
centered, stolid, and mature. In this way, alone, will he be able to come 
through the tremendous cataclysms of the next period without complete 
destruction. Dudley Kidd says that the Kaffirs are completely demoral- 

I Moml Instruction and Training in Schools (edited by Professor M. E. Sadler), 
Vol. I, p. 94. 



46 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

ized by the experiences of adolescence. From that time forth the whole 
of life centers in the experiences of sex. The white child escapes from these 
decentralizing results by reason of the fact that he has built up a core of 
organization and a premature maturity which can withstand the dissi- 
pating effects of the emotional disturbances of the storm and stress years. 
The school must organize itself into this fundamental phenomenon, and 
bend itself to this situation. 

But in the adolescent period the child comes to the time when ideas 
are rising, when problems are appearing, when experience is overflowing. 
There is definite opening-out of the complete social world and a foundation 
is appearing for relating all experience to the whole human experience. 
There is a demand for something to tie to, some line of activity to realize 
oneself upon. There is a demand for outlet and for ideas for mediating 
that demand. This is, traditionally, the period of religious conversions. 
But children differ greatly in the characteristics of the period, save that 
all, either slowly or in great emotional transformations, make life over in this 
period. This is just a plain statement of fact, which the school must organ- 
ize itself into. Conversion, or transformation, or growth ought to become 
definite forms of organizing the individual into the complete and mature 
order of the social world. Vocational interests and activities, social alli- 
ances, intellectual points of view, ideals of character and purpose, all are 
wrapped up in the way in which the educational forces bring their inter- 
preting, supporting, compelling, and criticizing powers to bear upon this 
period. The youth will come out of it with a broad variety of genuine 
interests, and with a full social consciousness, and with powers of reflection 
becoming definitely organized into instruments of analysis and control, 
if only education can be made to organize itself so into the actual course 
of adolescent experience as to be able to give that experience the interpre- 
tation and support it needs, instead of standing outside that experience and 
attempting to dictate its course into conventional channels. Here is where 
the moral life as an evolution of the inner life in terms of personal creative- 
ness will get its real enfranchisement — or its tendency to half-forms, to 
partial results and mere conventionality. 

Now, no detailed pedagogy of such a school is possible, at present. 
That is the work of experimentation and trial which numerous laboratory 
schools are attempting to carry out. This organic conception of education 
lies already at the heart of what is called the "new education." There has 
been no effort in this study to prove that no such conception has existed 
in the past, or that the ideal of much present-day education is not just 
this. The whole purpose of this study has been to show that all the tre- 



THE LOGIC OF SCHOOL 47 

mendous efforts in the direction of ''moral education" must relate them- 
selves back to this fundamentally organic point of departure, and that 
the demand for moral values in education must realize itself in terms of 
functions of the social life — consciousness and organization of control, 
power of analysis and of reaching a unified plan of action, power of pres- 
entation of all the concrete elements in any "moral situation," and the 
method of experience which can deal conclusively with the problems of 
life. These things are not "natural," in the sense that they can be depended 
upon to develop under any and all circumstances ; they are not to be grafted 
into experience in terms of ideas and extrinsic ideals; talks on moral habits 
will not produce them beyond possibility of failure; isolated forms of cor- 
porate imitation of society will not be sufhcient; life itself cannot be depended 
upon to do the work; the home has long since lost its power to carry the 
process through; the public school, as at present organized, is too remote 
from the actual realities of life and action to make its appeal in other than 
intellectual terms. 

The thinking that has wrought out the modern world of mature prob- 
lems and activities, that, on the great frontier of human endeavor, is solv- 
ing problems of individual and social well-being, and building deeper into 
the world of theory with every day we live, must turn its constructive 
thinking, also, upon this problem of assuring to the youth content of experi- 
ence in terms of a consciousness of self and the world, and organization of 
experience in terms of the complete method of reflective analysis and syn- 
thesis, by means of which the living and vital problems of the present shall 
become the heritage of the completely educated individual. Not for the 
few to carry on, merely; but for the whole body of men to share, each 
according to his powers doing the task that socially needs to be done — 
this is the burden of democracy. It is the meaning of moral education. 

Social psychology gives us the general character of the educative pro- 
cess — the development of the selves of social relationships, and the world 
of social means. Ethical theory gives us the content of moral education, 
or complete education — the social consciousness that is able to rise to the 
demands of a situation requiring action, and so to organize that action as 
to realize all the values that are involved in it. The logic of experience 
gives us the method of realizing such a complete organization of the powers 
of control within experience. Of course, such a method must here be stated 
in general terms; in any particular situation it will be necessary to make 
it keep close to the details of particularity. Character, the end of moral 
education, is to be defined as such an organization of personal selfhood, 
by means of large and rich content of experience and a correlative develop- 



48 CURRENT THEORIES OF MORAL EDUCATION 

ment of the powers of reflection, as shall insure that that self will, in 
successive stages of its development, successively identify itself with the 
"highest when it sees it"; but in that very identification it will be gaining 
the power to rise above the old good to new levels of good as the condi- 
tions of life demand. 

Can the school ever get back into the life, in this organic way, and 
relate itself to the actual world of the child, and become the means of organ- 
izing the implicit environment of the child in such ways that all these results 
shall be attained: the ever-more-inclusive self shall be called out, the more 
explicit consciousness shall be gained, the more complete content of mate- 
rials for organization shall be secured, and the definite process of organiza- 
tion shall be carried forward ? The answer to this question is a problem 
in social pedagogy; but the answer to it is essential to a final solution of 
the problem of moral education. So moral education merges even on 
its formal side over into the larger question of social pedagogy. It is cer- 
tain that many of the ideals of the advocates of "moral education" today 
are impracticable; for there is little use in filling a boy with "moral ideals," 
most, or all, of which he must lose in the actual work of the world. Moral 
education must not come at the problem from that extrinsic point of view. 
The life of the growing child is a function of the life of the social whole. 
To make him officiously "moral" is to make a fanatic of him. His morality 
must be a power of control of experience within the experience itself — 
a power of control which is based on rich content of experience, and power 
to organize that content into interpretation at need. This is the real work 
of the school, or of the educative forces of the community. But it will 
take definite work along the line of social pedagogy so to instil this organic 
concept of education into the social consciousness and conscience that 
society will consent to see the school be made the vital instrument for this 
living education. 



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